Tears of the Giraffe by Alexander McCall Smith

(This is another 2008 read, from just before Christmas. Just one left after this!)

This second book in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series: I thrill at the cadence of the language, the proper nouns that start with two unblendable consonants (there’s a word for this, but I’m blanking on it). The language helps me believe the African setting.

It seemed that not much happened in this book. I think perhaps it’s just this installment in the series; she’s newly engaged, and a lot of Tears of the Giraffe is spent with Ramotswe, and her fiance, coming to terms with this impending late-in-life melding of two lives.

I was distracted by how, mid-conversation, Mma Ramotswe would just start — and continue to completion, it seems — an internal dialogue tangential to the conversation she was having with another person. Somehow she was able to think several pages of thoughts between two short lines of flowing conversation.

What I said about the first book in the series, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency: I’m loving the African setting! When I first picked it up, I was reading in my head in the cadence that it seems Africans have (the ones I met anyway, when I visited, although where I sojourned to was quite far from the book’s Botswana setting). A strong female lead!